Quaint – a markup language loosely inspired by Markdown | Hacker News Reader

Quaint – a markup language loosely inspired by Markdown

breuleux.net

42 pointsadulau9 comments

One of the good things about markdown, and one of it's goals I guess, is that it looks like perfectly formatted, readable plaintext.

The shortcuts in quaint, with markers only at the beginning of words, logical operators etc, look very practical for typing, but make it more oriented towards technical writers or developers, and less suited for things like comments and similar general-purpose text inputs. It's somewhere in between Markdown and a template engine.

Yeah, I won't dispute that Markdown's emphasis syntax is a bit more layman-friendly than Quaint's (though there might be a way to hack it in anyway). One important goal with Quaint is syntactic consistency, though, which means some tradeoffs have to be made. I think it could be a nice option for comments or other generic input, though. Some implementations of Markdown can get a bit frustrating when you're trying to do some unusual things like nesting emphasis (though, to be fair, it's often only an implementation problem... I just wish they'd fix it).

Hrm, kind of cool, I guess. It's less useful to me because I don't really write much in the way of Python.

Markdown has many intercompatible implementations in multiple languages; with the ability to put arbitrary Python code into a Quaint template, that gets harder.

Are you thinking about how to go beyond a .py.q to other languages? (e.g. .js.q)

I am the author. Plain .q is supposed to be language agnostic (and I'd say it's relatively featureful), whereas .py.q, .js.q, etc. would be used if you wanted to embed some other language (though there's only a Python implementation for the time being). That's the logic behind the naming scheme, anyway :)

I think Quaint is awesome, but I am also into JS (or CoffeeScript really) since it runs in the browser and in Node.js. I was thinking of starting with the PEG.js http://pegjs.majda.cz/online online UI and hacking it so that certain types of delimited expressions in a document would insert themselves into the grammar. Seems like it would be a way to cheat and get something like Quaint for Node and the browser without having to write a parser etc.

I really like this project. For alot of writing, say a README, Markdown is probably preferable. But I've been taking notes for a Coursera course using IPython notebook. It's been good, but I've felt the limitations of markdown (no easy sub/superscript is a big one for math). Quaint looks like it would make that very easy, and my personal notes are not a domain where I'm concerned with using a new format.

For me, Markdown's issues relate to it's original purpose (which encapsulated use in emails) and it's use today (as a general long-form markup language).

I've found repeatedly that users dislike Markdown for the things that are hard to express in plain text (images, tables, links to some degree) and for surprising side effects of the syntax (in a hashtag age, headers appear too often and reduce readability, and the user misunderstands why).

What I would like to see is that Markdown is simplified further, and that some effort is made to find a better solution to links, images, etc.

To me this is solving all the wrong problems. I want to see a Markdown standard with the extensions like Markdown tables admitted (Markdown tables are really important for making Markdown usable), and a LaTeX extension for math (perhaps [this](https://github.com/justinvh/Markdown-LaTeX) is a good starting point).

By comparison, this project does not define a standard.

A small suggestion: add a proper <title> to the home page.

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